Carl Lange

Carl Lange (1834 to 1900) was a Danish physician who contributed to neurology, psychiatry and psychology. Born into a wealthy family in Vordingborg, he graduated in medicine at the University of Copenhagen in 1859. His 1885 work On Emotions: A Psycho-Physiological Study argued that emotions develop from, and can be reduced to, physiological reactions to stimuli, and he held specifically that vasomotor changes are the emotions. The American William James had published a similar view the year before, and the combined idea became known as the James-Lange theory of emotion. In 1886 Lange also described periodic depressions without mania, linked them to uric acid and advocated lithium, ideas the psychiatric community discarded at the time.